


The Wolf's Head Bar

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose, The Sentinel
Genre: Crossover, Gen, M/M, Shaman!Blair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sinner and a do-gooder meet in a bar.  Or as I said in the Dreamwidth post, Mab writes mystic shit again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wolf's Head Bar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elmyraemilie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elmyraemilie/gifts).



> If you're unfamiliar with Maiden Rose, the canon features partner rape and betrayal, which is discussed in this story, although not graphically.
> 
> This story is marked slash for the background pairings and gen for the events of the story. 
> 
> I wrote some very brief, spoilery notes on the salient points of the respective canons at the end of the Dreamwidth post where this story is also posted.  
> http://mab-browne.dreamwidth.org/284318.html
> 
> This story is for ElmyraEmilie, with thanks for her donation to Moonridge, a charity supported by TS fandom.
> 
> I know this is a weird crossover, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. And, in the two fandoms that have truly obsessed me in the last ten years, why is it bloody well always wolves?

So it’s this place again, Klaus thought. Last time he was here he drank too much and he felt like crap the morning after. There was nothing new there - Klaus was no stranger to morning after regrets.

He strode to the bar, through the buzz of conversation and the shadows of people seated at tables or leaning against the bar itself. This place was never full, but never empty either. The beer came in big glass steins, frostily etched with a stylised wolf’s head, and Klaus always had a coin or two in his pocket for as long as he needed to pay his way. He would hand over his money, never looking up at the server, and the beer would appear in front of him, a perfectly satisfactory arrangement. This time gave him pause when he handed over his money and saw Taki’s head in profile, stamped into the silver. He shrugged off the start of surprise; dreams were never anything but weird, and why not pay for his drink with a coin with Taki’s impress? King Taki. Emperor Taki, even. It seemed appropriate.

The beer was a rich, dark lager with a thick, foaming head. There was a fire place against one wall, big enough to roast at least a small porker, with a long wooden mantelpiece carved with a sinuous line of running wolves, and seats a comfortable distance from the fire. Klaus carried his precious beer across the room, which was busy with murmured voices that never quite turned to distinct conversation, and with shadows that never quite sharpened into clarity. He sat down on a wooden settle, highly polished and smelling of linseed oil, like the old bureau in his grandfather’s bedroom. He lifted his beer briefly to see it against the firelight. There were tints in the drink that were almost ruby, and Klaus appreciated them a moment before he lifted his stein to his lips and took his first swallow. It was good, so he took another. It was he thought, staring into the flames, as good a night to get drunk as any; a great night to get drunk, even.

There was a long bench set at an angle from Klaus’s seat, and one of the shadowy patrons sat down there, and gradually came into focus, a process that Klaus watched with suspicion. A man, Klaus’s age maybe, wearing a workman’s blue drill trousers and thick flannel shirt; his hands weren’t a workman’s, though. They looked as if they might have the capacity for strength, but the skin was soft and smooth. He had hair long like a girl’s, caught in a tail curling down his neck. He held a narrow glass in his hands, smaller than Klaus’s hearty stein. It was etched with the wolf’s head design too.

“You’ll need a few of those to get drunk, even if there’s not that much of you,” Klaus told him, irritated at the disruption of his solitude.

“I’m not here to get drunk,” the man told him. His voice was deeper than Klaus might have expected from someone with those big blue eyes and full lips. “As a matter of fact, I think that this is the last place I’d choose to get drunk, unless I was sure that someone had my back.”

Klaus briefly and mockingly saluted the man with his stein. “I think I’m big enough to take care of myself.”

“Uh huh”, his unwelcome companion commented, his glance suggesting that the fact Klaus had at least six inches and fifty pounds on him had been noted and dismissed as unimportant, although not necessarily unappreciated. “I’m Blair.”

“Bully for you,” Klaus told him. His rudeness didn’t have the desired effect. 

Blair chuckled, but Klaus saw the nervousness under the surface calm. “Oh, man, what is it with getting off on the wrong foot with people? And I haven’t even got around to accidentally insulting you yet.” 

The deprecation was good humoured and genuine, which tended Klaus towards letting this guy down easily. “It must make pick-ups interesting if you’re always accidentally insulting people.”

Blair had been taking a sip of his beer, and he choked. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he sputtered. He lifted his head as he recovered his breath. “You might be big and beautiful and know it, but this is _not_ that kind of bar. And I’m taken anyway.”

“So am I,” Klaus told him and regretted the information immediately. He was here to drink and forget, forget that he was taken and owned, and wrong about everything. “So if this isn’t that kind of bar and you’re not that kind of boy, then how about we just enjoy our drinks.” 

Blair lowered his face into his palm and muttered about killing somebody, not Klaus but someone with a name like ‘Carcha’. Then he looked Klaus in the eyes once more. “Drink up, man, you need some of the good stuff inside you.” He gulped down his own beer and waited, expectant and impatient, for Klaus to finish his stein, a process that Klaus dragged out as long as possible because Blair’s foot-tapping frustration with Klaus had entertainment value, and Klaus had a gut instinct that not much of this experience would be entertaining.

“Another one?” Klaus suggested, lifting his stein. 

Blair’s mouth twisted in anger before his face smoothed into something more controlled. “I don’t think so,” he said and enclosed Klaus’s wrist in his hand. Klaus stood and tried to twist his arm away, expecting to easily break this annoying little man’s grip but Blair’s hand stayed steadfast around Klaus’s wrist. The surprise of both of them appeared about equal.

“Well, all right,” Blair said, his sudden ease at his situation in contrast to Klaus’s growing agitation. God, all that Klaus had wanted was a beer and the chance to just not think. Clearly, too much to ask. "Have you ever stepped outside?” Blair enquired.

“No,” Klaus replied, clipped and slightly breathless, because he was still trying to pull his arm away, but it might as well have been encased in stone for all the chance he had of it.

“Okay, then, let’s go and check out today’s view,” Blair said, and dragged Klaus along as if Klaus was five. The bar’s shadowy patrons remained disinterested shadows as Klaus was dragged out the door like a recalcitrant child to judgement. Outside, it was a dim, blue-lit forest, alive with bird calls that Klaus had never heard before, brassy and raucous. Blair stopped, and looked up into the moon-limned tree canopy. “Not what we need, so we’re going to have to take a walk.” He let go of Klaus’s arm. “This will work better if you’re not fighting me, you know.”

“Why shouldn’t I fight you?”

“Because I’m trying to help you. You are not a stupid guy; why don’t you get it?” Blair’s voice rose in frustration. “How can you be _here_ and be so damn blind!”

It was good to be tall. Klaus had looked down on nearly everyone he knew from not long before his seventeenth birthday, and he loomed over this do-gooder as threateningly as he knew how. “Why would you want to help me?” he asked, putting all the sceptical insolence he could into the question.

The do-gooder barely appeared to notice the looming, except to adjust his stance to glare up at Klaus and meet his eyes. “Because you have a destiny that you are seriously going to fuck up if you don’t shift some of the shit you’re carrying around. And because I got helped here, and what comes around goes around. God!” The last word was rough with angry frustration, and Blair’s hands were raised in apparent plea to the heavens. He calmed somewhat, although there was still an edge of strain in his voice. “Look. Your name is Klaus von Wolfstadt, and the decor back there,” a thumb jabbed towards the lights and talk behind them, “is symbolic for a reason. Everyone who comes here has a little lupine something in their lives somewhere. “ Blair’s face grew thoughtful. “And wolves are pack and family animals and don’t do so well on their own. So... how are you doing, Klaus?”

“I don’t see how anything about me is your business.”

“Powers that be are making it my business, man. Look....” Blair took a couple of breaths, slow ritual inhalations in and out of his nose. “Take a walk with me. I won’t even expect you to do any talking. I can fill any gaps in conversation all by myself, no problem.”

Klaus grinned then, amused despite himself. “So fill the gaps, then, wolf man. 

Blair shook his head, a small smile twitching his mouth. “Oh, that’s a dangerous invitation. Let’s start with something that’s not actually a specialty of mine. Wolves. How down are you with a little nature study?”

Klaus gestured with exaggerated courtly formality, but he remembered that iron grip around his wrist. Play along, let them talk. Talk yourself only when there was a point – or you couldn’t bear the silence or the stupidity any longer. “Please,” he purred. “By all means.”

“Your clothes, and your look and your name. You come from somewhere European, right?”

“Wrong, if you mean Eurotean.” 

Blair paused, confused by the frost in Klaus’ voice, before he shook his head as if clearing it. “Wild,” he drawled. “Have you guys hunted your wolves to extinction?”

“We haven’t seen any for a hundred years or more. But I thought you were supposed to be talking, not me.”

Blair shrugged. “Yeah, I am, right. Wolves. Okay. Wolves are territorial and gregarious, and there’s some interesting differences between wolf packs from the two major continents where I come from, which it’s occurred to me may not be the major continents where you come from.” His face lit with an engaging smile. “Which, just, wow. There are elements of this mystic plane thing which are absolutely amazing.”

Klaus lifted one eyebrow, and Blair grinned unapologetically, clearly amused in his turn. “Wolves. Okay...” They walked on through thick, moonlit forest, while Blair talked. His voice was pleasant enough, but Klaus seriously regretted the lost chance at a second beer.

~*~  
The jungle air had a heavier scent to it than the woodlands that Klaus remembered, and there was only the gentlest of warm, earthy breezes. He knew a perhaps not surprising amount about Blair now, because the man liked to talk, sweet Christos, did he like to talk. He knew that Blair was a professor, and that he’d travelled widely enough to pick up some amusing anecdotes. He made himself sound harmless and even foolish; Klaus held reservations as to that judgement. He knew that Blair’s waking land was richer and more peaceful than Klaus’s, which mixed extra acid into a brew of resentment begun with that unceremonious, undignified departure from the bar, and this apparently aimless trek.

There was a slope ahead of them and they both noticed the rush of a different breeze together. This wind came from a drier, colder space. It had whistled over an emptier land than the rich, fetid jungle all around them.

Blair sobered noticeably. He’d been an amiable, garrulous companion for the long walk, but now his face hardened. Not foolish, and not harmless at all, Klaus thought. All the talk had indicated a passionate, obsessive man in its quiet, meandering way, and passion and obsession were always costly.

“You ready, man?” Blair enquired.

“Ready for what?” Klaus said, but he knew the memory of the land ahead, the crisp snow scent and the whisper of grassland.

Exasperation appeared plain on Blair’s face, but there was an odd gentleness behind it. “For whatever’s over that hill. Which I’ll warn you, will include talking. By you, because I think I’ve carried the conversation long enough.” He led the way up the slope, and Klaus followed, unwilling, but feeling the drag of inevitability

They crested the hill. The jungle thinned away behind, and in front of them the land folded into grassy hill country. Klaus best remembered the sky the dull grey of coming dawn, with Taki’s anguished face the sun in his sky.

Blair stared, his face thoughtful. “I think the word is ‘stark’, compared to where I come from. Is it horse country?”

“No.” Klaus’s tongue was a dry block of wood. “At least, not so far as I know. It’s called No-Man’s Land. But it belongs to Taki.”

“And Taki would be part of why we’re here.”

There was something in Blair’s voice that reminded Klaus of a man who’d spoken to Willie in the hospital, poor Willie blinded and crazy, but the crazy had come before the blindness, had precipitated the events that led to the blindness. Every pilot feared fire. “Are you an alienist, Blair?” Klaus snapped. “Do you have a little list of questions?”

“I have a big fucking list of questions, man, some of which are germane to all this and some of which are just because I like asking questions. An alienist... you mean a psychiatrist?” Blair sat down on the ground. The land sloped down towards a point where it sloped up again, the way that hill country did, and Blair stared out across the grass, green in places, buff where the grass heads had seeded in great clumps. “I studied that for a while.” He grinned. “Psychology as a form of shamanism or priesthood. It’s not exactly a new idea.” He patted the ground beside him with his hand. “Sit down.”

“I’ll stand, thanks.” Klaus jammed his hands into his pockets and looked out across those green hills, Taki’s sacred land.

“So why are we here, Klaus?”

“You’re the one who brought me here. Don’t you know?” Klaus couldn’t have kept the mocking edge out of his tone if he’d tried, and he had no inclination to try.

“Believe it or not, you brought us here. Now why don’t you can the attitude and try to work with me.” Blair had turned, and one fist hit against the turf. “And then we can both go back where we belong.” The good humour was gone again; he sounded purely irritated.

The wind blew Klaus’s hair back from his face. It came from No-Man’s land, and it smelled of coal smoke, blood and sleet. The vivid rush of memory loosened his tongue in a way that Blair’s earnest frustration never would. “He brought me back, there. I was dying – shock and hypothermia and too much speed jigging my heartbeat, and I smelled his scent.” He stared out blindly and then dropped clumsily to the ground. “He smells like flowers.” He drew up his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around. “I always knew I’d have to share him – he has an over-developed sense of noblesse oblige.” One last disconnected sentence. “Have you ever wanted something so badly that you threw your whole life away for it?”

“Yes,” Blair said. “Yes, I have.”

“Did you get it?”

“Enough of it,” Blair told him.

Klaus laughed at that. “Ah, that’s the point, isn’t it. Enough of it. I’ve never been very good at ‘enough’.” He looked at Blair, a few feet away down the slope. “What if you hadn’t had your ‘enough’? What if you thought that the thing that you threw your life away for was a deceit and a delusion? What then, learned professor?”

Blair’s face filled with wary compassion. “I don’t know. That would be a hard thing.”

“Would you want to hurt somebody? Would you want revenge, retribution? What do you think?”

“I think that revenge is a dangerous idea.”

“Revenge is about survival!” Klaus shouted. “Blow for blow and the man who doesn’t get up to deal the last blow is the man who loses! Or is your home so impregnably safe that your people have forgotten that?”

Blair stood up from his seat on the grassy slope and came to crouch beside Klaus. “War and revenge are two separate things. They may get all mixed together sometimes, but I don’t think that we’re talking about war here.” His hand closed over Klaus’s shoulder and Klaus’s own hand shot up to clench Blair’s wrist. Blair winced, but he didn’t let go, nor did he try to free himself.

“Oh, it was war,” Klaus breathed. “He let me rape him as strategy, you know.” He watched the shock blank Blair’s earnest face, felt the flinch of his arm.

When Blair spoke it was with the level, cautious voice of the alienist. “I don’t think that anyone lets themselves be raped.”

How could a laugh taste like ashes? This one did, so Klaus spat it out as best he could. “Ah, but I told you about that ridiculous sense of noblesse oblige. He got it into his pretty head that a little ignorant rape between lovers was so much better than me knowingly violating the emperor’s sacred maiden rose.”

“Is that what he told you?” Surely Klaus was hurting Blair, but his gaze, steady and disappointed, damn him, never shifted.

“He never told me a thing. Maybe he never will.”

“Then how can you know what he thinks?”

“I don’t know!” The cry flew to the sky and was gone, unlike the agonised self-disgust that had launched it. “He’d rather chew his wrists to pieces than tell me anything!” 

“It has to stop. It absolutely has to stop.”

Shamed fury tunnelled Klaus’s vision. “I know that. But who the hell are you to tell me that, when he won’t?”

“He can’t do it, yet. I can.”

Blair’s hand was still closed around Klaus’s shoulder, and Klaus released his wrist and knocked his arm aside. Blair lost his balance and threw his arms back to stop himself falling on his backside onto the grass. 

“Oh, I can guess what he might do and why, but I can’t _know_.” Klaus glared at Blair, sitting startled and ineffectual in the grass. Do-gooders, he thought. “Any more than you can know. What can you and your powers that be know?” He stood and turned his back on the grassland, marching up the slope the way they’d come.

“I know enough.” Empty words, Klaus thought, bravado. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“And you’ll stop me, little man?”

“I don’t have to,” Blair said grimly. 

Klaus only shook his head, but the movement died away with the awareness of heated vertigo expanding in his head, and the sickly twist of his guts. “Huh,” he muttered. “I guess that the beer wasn’t so good after all.” The cramp in his stomach became agonising and he dropped to his knees, on all fours while his body flashed hot and cold, and oceans, it seemed, rolled up his throat. He opened his mouth to gasp for breath, and vomited, a thick black stream. Not black the way he’d seen some men vomit, everything curdled with blood; this was a glossy stream that settled around him like a mirror of jet – shining and smooth, smelling of rot and spreading out around him, covering his hands, wetting the knees of his trousers. 

“Holy shit!” he heard Blair exclaim, before he grabbed Klaus’s hand. “I’ve got you,” Blair panted. “I’ve got you.”

A good thing that Blair had him. Blair was braced on his belly on the edge of a slick, gurgling pool, and Klaus flailed and choked; no bottom for his feet, no air for his lungs. With his free hand he grabbed for a tussock of grass, aware of circling currents that drove down. He held himself there at the edge, anchored by his grip in the fragile grass and Blair’s hot, sweaty hold on his other hand, and coughed until his all his torso hurt and he could take a shaky breath.

“Come on, man, you have to climb out of here. _You_ have to do it, I can help, but you have to work for it too.”

It was that easy, was it? Klaus didn’t think so, began to see in this pleasant, easy-talking man a pattern of facile manipulation. Such a simple lesson, to vomit up the pain and leave it behind. Pull the stick towards you, press gently on the rudder to change direction, and soar freely into a new life. Did Blair and his nameless powers think that Klaus was six years old again? Contrarily, Klaus let go of his grip on the grass beside the whirlpool. The current surged and Blair exclaimed in startled fear as he was jerked closer to the edge. 

So. Perhaps not so facile. Blair’s face was that of a man facing something unexpected, but his hand stayed locked in Klaus’s. “Come on! Come on, try, will you?” The agony of determined strain marked his face and his body, but there was something stirring beneath it, just as the currents swirled around Klaus. It looked suspiciously like a sort of horror that Klaus had seen turn to panic.

“Fuck you, Wolfstadt, I’m not going in that water!”

“Then let go,” Klaus said. “I won’t fight you.” It was nearly true. The drag of the current became almost delicate, almost a caress, an intimation that it wouldn’t be so bad to let go and go down.

Blair’s head turned infinitesimally, the reflex, even in the middle of all this struggle, of a man who didn’t want his face to be seen. There was a long silence of averted eyes, before Blair ground out between his teeth, “I don’t think so.”

Chivalry. Klaus appreciated it, but it was stupid. “You should let me go,” he said, voice rasping with effort. “It’s just a dream.”

Blair’s face tautened with new determination. “Stupid, self-destructive....” He stopped to squirm for better purchase against the pull of Klaus’s weight and the relentless current. “What sort of man do you think you’ll wake up as if you get sucked to the bottom of this?”

Go down once – and Klaus would be the man whose clearest memory of his grandfather would be not the stories he patiently told two small children, but the pervasive smell of liquor on his breath. Go down twice, and be the man whose best recollection of his mother was the moment she sat opposite him at the breakfast table, the arm permanently damaged by the stroke useless in her lap; he was pierced, in that moment, by her bitter jealousy that he still had the sky . Go down for the third and last time, and let his abject terror that Taki’s feelings for him had been an autocratic, inexperienced boy’s waning infatuation be his only truth, and have it justify anything.

‘Forgive me’, Taki had asked him. There wasn’t much, when Klaus considered it, that Taki had ever _asked_ him for.

He struggled forward, kicking against the force that tried to drag him down, and took another clump of grass into his empty fist. Blair took the chance to haul backwards, and Klaus considered the mechanics of climbing onto land. “There’s no purchase,” he told Blair.

“I know,” Blair said, struggling to sit on his haunches. “But try anyway!”

Klaus might be trapped in water, but as he struggled to move, it felt most like g-force – that sense of being pinned, and held, pressed by unforgiving gravity. He shouted, frustrated rage, and managed to flop upwards towards the grass, one leg almost lifting out of the water. Blair lunged wildly and caught one hand in Klaus’s belt and with a grunt hoisted him up and almost entirely onto dry land. Blair tumbled back, while Klaus lay face down like a gutted fish.

Everything around him was silence. Comparative silence at least. There was the sound of his own breathing, and the hammering thump of his heart under his ribs. There were the occasional raucous squawks of whatever it was that lived in the forest behind them , and the hollow murmur of the fresh wind coming from No-Man’s Land. Eventually, Klaus lifted his head. Beside him, Blair sat propped against the side of a great black cat, his arms around its neck, his face buried in its fur. His shoulders stopped shaking as Klaus watched. The cat stared at Klaus disdainfully and drew its lips back from its muzzle in a silent snarl. This did not go unmarked. “Stop that,” Blair commanded, before he sat up properly and looked at Klaus, who struggled up to sit too. The cat remained on its guard, but it looked pointedly off somewhere to the side of Klaus.

Any evidence of tears had been blotted away in the chokehold embrace around the cat. Blair’s face bore a look that Klaus had seen a lot of – the slightly unsteady, gently euphoric expression of someone who knows that they’ve gotten away with something dangerous.

“I thought you said it was all about wolves,” Klaus said. 

Blair’s eyes narrowed, before he tapped twice at his sternum with a clenched fist. “The wolf is here.” A tilt of his head indicated the cat. “He’s a friend.” He shut his eyes and took that slow, ritual breath that Klaus had observed before. “How do you feel?”

“Well, it certainly left my mother’s castor oil purge in the dust.”

“Uh-huh.” Blair brought his clasped hands to rest against his mouth, like Claudia at her prayers when she was young. His eyes above those clasped hands were thoughtful and a little unsure. “Some of the burden’s gone, but you, you are way too good at loading yourself down.” He stood, and extended a hand to Klaus. Klaus took it and was hauled to his feet. They stood there, hands still joined.

“It’s hard. I know it’s hard, but try keeping your head above water, okay? You’ve got too much to lose.”

Blair meant well, and Klaus granted that maybe there had been a point to this, but he didn’t need an accounting of what he had to lose. “So do you. Why do this?”

Blair turned his head to look at the great cat, which sat in a still and listening silence. “It’s like I said. What comes around, goes around.”

“You know, you’re insane. Charming, but insane.”

Blair frowned, and thumped his fist against Klaus’s shoulder. “It takes one to know one, Klaus von Wolfstadt.” He drew back, ending the grasp of their hands. “I have to go. Take care, okay?”

“If you do the same.”

“I try, man. I try.” The big, black beast rose to its feet and turned to walk back into the forest, before it paused, turning its great head to stare back at them, and made a noise that could only be described as impatient. Blair lifted one hand in a gesture of farewell and turned to walk off with the cat. The jungle veiled them both.

Klaus turned to look out over No Man’s land. The pool was gone without a trace, and he was clean and dry. He sat down again, his arms wrapped around his bent knees once more, before he lay upon the rough turf and stared up at the sky. He’d vomited up his guts, but a drunken mellowness buzzed though his skin, as if he’d kept that beer from the Wolf’s Head bar inside him, and added a few others to it for good measure. “My reward for being a good boy?” he inquired of the sky. Then he shut his eyes. The last thing his senses caught before sleep took him was the scent of flowers.


End file.
